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Put Knowledge in the Service of Production
The Wall Street Journal
TREVOR BUTTERWORTH | The Wall Street Journal
The Industrial Enlightenment put knowledge in the service of production, changing the course of history.
Why did Britain have an industrial revolution first? Why not France or the Netherlands, given their economic power in the 17th century and, at the time, the increasingly free market in ideas between Paris, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and London?
Mr. Mokyr's answer is that in Britain ideas interacted vigorously with business interests in "a positive feedback loop that created the greatest sea change in economic history since the advent of culture."
Reduced to a thumbnail sketch, liberty and natural philosophy—a catch-all term for the study of "useful" knowledge— begat prosperity, which begat more liberty and useful knowledge, which in turn spread through Europe and the Americas.
"Industrial Enlightenment" was ... a belief "that material progress and economic growth could be achieved through increasing human knowledge of natural phenomena and making this knowledge accessible to those who could make use of it in production."
The goal was betterment, prosperity, personal happiness.
Indeed, a host of liberal ideas ... took hold:
the rejection of mercantilism's closed markets,
the weakening of guilds and the expansion of internal free trade
robust physical and intellectual property rights
These put Britain far ahead of France, where violent revolution was needed to disrupt the privileges of the old regime.
"The Enlightened Economy" is perceptive examination of the birth of economic prosperity ...
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